JHU Alum Wins Coveted Genius Grant

The first hint that behavioral economist Colin Camerer was a genius might have been that he graduated from Johns Hopkins… when he was 17. And everything since then has been kind of genius-y, too.
Camerer, who found out this week that he won a MacArthur “genius grant” (and $625,000 in no-strings-attached money), racked up an MBA in finance by 19 and a PhD in behavioral decision theory from the University of Chicago by the time he was 21.

The MacArthur Foundation said that it had selected Camerer for “expanding our knowledge of individual behavior and challenging models of human interaction that form the basis of classic economic theory.” Put simply, the current CalTech prof studies the seemingly-random way we make decisions in high stakes situations to better understand how our often irrational brains impact the eminently rational discipline of economics.

The only problem that Camerer faces at this point is where to go from here. After all, once you’ve been dubbed an official genius at 53, what’s your next step? A Nobel?